The Rover(ing) CEO

James Richmond, CEO, Nevaya, discusses his journey from road-warrior entrepreneur to globe-spanning CEO

‘I didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur. When I was at school I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I did know that I wanted to keep my options open, so I chose the degree that would let me do that, which was engineering.

‘And it was good fun. But during my time at university I started up a tiny little business doing bookings for hotels in Devon – the old way, with a telephone – and taking a commission. Then after university, when I was living at home, with my Mum asking me when I was going to get a job, I bumped back into Ben [Clifford, co-founder and CTO] who I had first met when we were 13. He had created an online hotel booking system and we decided to work together.

‘This was back in 2003 when wifi was taking off and we travelled around the country pitching the concept of installing the service in the guest room. We did that for a few months but it was a really hard sell – hotels weren’t convinced guests would need the service beyond the lobby. In the end we were saved by a bible college, the Assemblies of God, who took a leap of faith and saved us from having to get a real job.

‘At that point I was very much a founder, not CEO. I was just trying to pay the bills and move out of home, travelling around the country in my Rover and it was a slow process. There were some days where we thought we were going to run out of money, but we were saved by the generosity of our suppliers who let us delay payments and kept us afloat.

‘Ben had developed some amazingly good tech which enabled high-speed guest internet access and we started to gain traction. We added a third person, Eryk and then much later, in 2017, we decided to move into SaaS, which is where we operate today and which allowed us to move away from physical technology and having teams on the ground to being able to offer a global service.

‘That chance to build something is what attracts me to being an entrepreneur. We’re in 40-plus countries, working for some of the big hotel groups and we’re really gaining momentum, which is exciting. But it’s when you get that growth that the roles change, that you go from having to wear all the hats to trying to become a CEO.

‘It was a challenge taking that decision to grow. We had got to the position where we owned the business fully, had no VCs, and we had a really profitable business model. We realised we had bigger ambitions and goals, and decided to go for it, to reinvest, and exponentially accelerate the number of guests benefiting from our platform every year.

‘It was very much a decision point for the business because we could have stayed as we were. But we saw the potential to really change the guest travel experience and make a mark.

‘I’m a first-time CEO, I’ve never done it before. And equally, I’ve never seen the outside world, never learned from others how to be a CEO. It’s been a long, slow, slightly painful learning. We now have a senior leadership team and, for me, it means letting go of the big functions and acting and behaving in a different way to maximise the performance of the team. It feels very different.

‘It can be quite anxiety provoking and it’s hard to give up the things you love, the thrill of closing the next big deal. You need to have full trust in the team, not butting in and being a pain in the ass. I can’t become a bottleneck, people have to make decisions on their own.

‘It has given me the chance to lean into the big partnership relationships, but I am also enjoying building the team and helping to create that company culture. We’ve doubled our headcount in the last 12 months and it’s been great to see people collaborating and getting on. We had a team event recently where we flew people in from every corner of the world and it felt good, really good.

‘We want to have a true team spirit, a cohesiveness. If something goes wrong, it’s about helping to understand, not blame. We don’t believe in that ethos you can see in tech, of running people into the ground, that’s not who we are. During the pandemic we did have to run very lean for 18 months and it did stretch people too far.

‘We’re now operating from a place of balance, and always looking towards robots and automation so that we have the minimum possible effective team size that delivers the best possible service in the industry. The philosophy is always to look at how things are done, and looking if there are ways to automate it. Get the robots to do the hard work.

‘The people that are here are a very special group of people and our focus is around sustainably building the team but not adding headcount at an amazing rate just because you haven’t thought properly about an efficient business model.

‘We hope we are true innovators, and we’re bold, and we’ll take risks to to change things up. We’ve placed some big bets on our new product – not a crazy risk, but a calculated risk, because we believe in the much bigger market opportunity.

‘And from there? There are different paths depending on how far we get along the journey. The beauty of the long journey is that we still have 100% ownership of the business. The not so great part is it has been 20 years without a break. A break would be good. But at the moment I’m still caught up in the buzz.’

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